something generally is

Pavement - Quarantine the Past: The Best of Pavement (lala)
Ted Leo + Pharmacists - The Brutalist Bricks (out tomorrow, you can hear it at their MySpace)
Blitzen Trapper - Wild Mountain Nation (lala)
Various videos by Souled American
Boxhead Ensemble - Niagra Falls (lala)
Twenty Six - This Skin is Rust (ROOT BLOG)

I thought Matt Perpetua was jumping the shark a bit with a 10 out of 10 rating for the Pavement Greatest Hits, but if anything underscores Generation P's need to excite the atoms of their immediate nostalgia, it is this collection. And damn, it totally holds its water, better than some of the actual Pavement records do now.

I'm tired of listing Chronic City; I think I may be reading that book forever and listing it seems akin to listing that I breathed some air today. The alt-est of alt-country bands Souled American came up in one of the book's many stoned conversations and spurred this escapade. I like how the songs takes a while to get started in this first video, it made me think something is wrong, which is exactly what Souled American wants you to think. Something generally is.

Case in point: the above photo is supposed to be of a giant inflated crawfish in LaPalce, but is instead the dumpster behind it.


Souled American -"In the Mud"


Souled American - "True Swamp"

Boxhead Ensemble is the ambient folky mess of SA's former guitar player Scott Tuma and others. It's the kind of stuff I like to call "chicken fried trance music." Bow a gong, get it on, y'all!

New York One - Boxhead Ensembl...

I don't know any more about the lonely, lonely music of Twenty-Six than is listed here. I just know that it is lonely, lonely.

everything's going everywhere

Sparklehorse - Good Morning Spider (lala)

I've never been that big of a Sparklehorse fan; I always felt they/he tried to put too much into a song, not beyond his capabilities or outside bounds of propriety, but more than the song could handle and parts would spill all over the side and go everywhere, and not in a glorious explosion way but in an everything's going everywhere way. An editor wisely excised a disparagement of his production style I implanted in a Daniel Johnston piece; the stuff is good if it gets under my skin like that. The album with David Lynch sounded like a winner. Poor guy, though. My thoughts are with the family he left behind. I suggest someone go give that dude from the Eels a big hug (just in case), and sprinkle a little glitter into the wind for poor old Mark Linkous.

Sick Of Goodbyes - Sparklehors...

do the dog

The Mother Hips - Pacific Dust (lala)
The Specials - The Specials (lala)

This was a massive weekend that began with (1) chocolate and macadamia nut scones at Strand's, which might have been the best thing I ever heard of if someone hadn't mentioned that they sometimes make ones with white chocolate and lime. Maya had the apple strudel in the back. We made some great exquisite corpse monsters. (2,3) At lunch I had the (4) grilled redfish poboy at Another Broken Egg, a place I mistakenly had pegged as a bland old folks breakfast joint. The one out in the suburbs is, but dude, this was getting an ettouffee po-boy, big chunks of andouille sausage and enough butter to shave off some of those bitter, incontinent months at the end of my time on this earth. That evening I went on assignment to (5) the Richard Sale Barn, an old cattle auction barn in Abbeville, LA to witness Henry Gray (Howlin' Wolf's piano player) throw down with his band. More on that to come. Our two predetermined seafood place choices were closed so we hit Mel's Diner in Lafayette where they were proudly (6) "Reintroducing The Swiss Boy." Once I ordered, the guy at the next table leaned over and asked "Hey, do you like hamburgers?"

Any close reader of this site and casual observer of my physical form will know that indeed I do like hamburgers. Turns out this guy is the mastermind behind AcadianaHamuburger.com, the online face of his greater mission of sussing out the best hamburger in the area. The guy is thorough and not snobby in the least - he said he'd had a hamburger at the Cajundome concession stand while watching the mixed martial arts fights on a date night with his wife and would be including it in his survey. He handed me a card and similarly evangelized his quest to others in the place. My Swiss Boy came (7) and I wished I'd gotten the hamburger. When an expert presents himself, take his advice.

Sunday we took Maya and a friend to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D IMAX in New Orleans (unpictured) , and nope, I still can't see 3-D. I have wonky eyes. I have this sinking fear that soon all movies will be in 3-D and I will be further distanced from the Great American Movie Enthusiasm. I made a casual disparaging remark abt the Oscars on the place where one makes such remarks and felt immediately like retracting, like I was the a-hole in line to take Christmas photos that felt a need to declare the mall Santa a fake.

Oh, actually the weekend started with a (8) fried catfish Friday lunch at Zeeland's, where it was the cashier's birthday (9). Happy birthday, Stacy!

All the while I half listened to the Mother Hips record but had "Do the Dog" in my head.

It beats the arch-Americana

Smart: @JennyHolzer on Twitter. Straighten up yr act with some Jenny Holzer's truisms.

The Mother Hips - Pacific Dust (lala)
Shooter Jennings & Hierophant - Black Ribbons (lala) Each twice.
Trailer for "The Runaways" (via The Awl)
Calexico - "I Send My Love To You" (Captain Obvious)
North Mississippi All-Stars - Live at the Highline Ballroom, 2/26/2010 (nyctaper)

Those sons of country pioneers are a bunch of shapeshiters. Shooter Jennings has crafted something along the lines of a vaugely Skynyrdian take on Tool, complete with paranoid Art Bell radio inserts. I dunno, I dug it. It beats the arch-Americana one unfortunately expects and often gets from a dude whose dad we all love too much. The Mother Hips make me wanna go on a road trip; in fact I am this weekend, so I'll bring them along.

On my second trip to the book bazaar I saw a weathered copy of Nilsson Sings Newman and it made me wonder why no one does that anymore. How come there isn't a Banhart sings Oldham record out there? I bet it would be pretty. Until there is, Calexico is taking up the slack with their bio-luminescent cover of a Will Oldham number from the early Palace years.

revolutionaries linger

Thee Silver Mt. Zion memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales (lala)
Various Artists - Zabriskie Point Soundtrack (lala)
The Mother Hips - Pacific Dust (lala)

Hey, Sweet Tooth #8 is out and about. Paper Shrine did a stunning layout job, setting the bar high for Baton Rouge culture broadside design. There are copies up at Highland Coffees and elsewhere that revolutionaries linger, and PDF copies are available here. In this issue we dissect 2009 to see who we actually are today.

Also, in this week's Record Crate blog for 225 Magazine, we (that's the editorial we instead of the royal one) say goodbye to blues harmonica legend Brian "B. B." Bruce and question the way we sanitize our legends vs. letting them keep it real.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion memorial Orchestra believe in the cause more than you believe in anything, and that belief is meted out in raw throats and expertly recorded guitar reverb. Here they are doin' their thing over Zabriskie Point footage.



I've never seen Zabriskie Point, dubbed by David Fricke "one of the most extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history" but that is enough to pique my interest. The soundtrack is a sunny, wasted afternoon of hippie-pocalypse sweetness.

Brother Mary - Kaleidocope

Love Scene - Jerry Garcia

The Mother Hips, well, they are just sweet hippies, which, like Jesus, is alright with me. I particularly like this rambling idyll through the childhood of one of my favorite composers, Charles Ives.

Young Charles Ives - The Mothe...

rough 'n' pleasant

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (via BoingBoing)
DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid feat. Mad Professor & Lee "Scratch" Perry - Dubometry (lala)
Ayatollah - Now Playing (lala)

I like how my building looks like a haunted mansion at night, which I guess it sorta is. It is the oldest standing building on campus and I've heard there is a ghost, but have neither witnessed it nor heard the phantasmagorical details.

I also like how Ruffin G. Pleasant sounds like rough 'n' pleasant. How I like it, yo.

Kingston - Ayatollah

Here is a portrait of the old fellow.



As 36th Governor of Louisiana from 1916-1920, Pleasant got us ready for WWI, a big topic around our house as of late. He was born in Shiloh, LA and fought in the Spanish-American war as a lieutenant-colonel of the First Louisiana Regiment of Infantry.

The Pleasants had a way with badass names: his parents were Benjamin Franklin Pleasant and the former Martha Washington Duty.

I got all this from Wikipedia. I thought about saying the ghost told me all this but I don't like to unnecessarily mess with dark forces. Ruffin had a stormy relationship with Huey P. Long over the years and dig this salacious bit about his poor wife Anne:

Anne Ector Pleasant died in 1934 after accidentally drinking a poisonous antiseptic in a dark bathroom in their Shreveport home. She was the founder and headmistress of Pleasant Hall, a coed private school in Shreveport. She had sued then U.S. Senator Huey Long for having caused her to be arrested on false charges and for having demeaned her as a "drunken cursing woman" when she sought to examine state public records in the Capitol in Baton Rouge.

Maybe she's the ghost, forever looking to kick the Kingfish's ass.

goodness gracious

This afternoon, I went to a Microsoft TechNet seminar on Visual Studio 2010 and its integration with SharePoint in the room depicted above. It's OK if you didn't know or forgot I was a computer nerd. Sometimes I forget myself.

The room is a music performance chapel of WEBC SonLife Radio, an arm of the withered Jimmy Swaggart Ministries that partially occupies the massive complex flanking Bluebonnet Lane he built in his flush years. I forget the old boy is still going; the Big Christians in town now are over at Bethany World Prayer Center, who have three giant crosses casting their shadow over the clogged interstate. I ran into a guy I used to work with whose company rents space in the complex and he said two conditions of his lease are no alcohol on premise (I can see that) and no cursing. I live in a weirdly religious place.

I ran into my editor at the book sale and chatted about my progress. I professed wanting to get this book done so I could start on the next one, and one of the ideas I've kicked around is a ramble through the role religion plays in this weird place in which I live. The "no cursing" clause only solidifies the idea.

The Microsoft trainer did his best to stay on the straight and narrow, a condition of using the chapel, but foul language and software development go hand in hand. At least in my experience it does. I have to do some tonight so we'll see.

I do wish ol' Jimmy would do some sort of olde time musical gospel, banging out some glory on an old piano at the full gale of his talent; remember he is the cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis, who has said the two probably should have switched careers in their youth.

Here is the massive wall Bible quote fragment in the building's atrium. "...his ministers a flaming fire." The temptation is strong to graffito a "great balls of" in there, but then that might be dangerously close to cursing.